Marie Antoinette's Darkest Days by Will Bashor

And while Marie Antoinette suffered in the Conciergerie, so did all his majesty’s prisoners before her, some no less innocent than herself. But while conceding that Marie Antoinette was “well known for her lavish expenditures and frivolous lifestyle,” he seems as puzzlingly reluctant as the queen to connect all the dots between that frivolity and the scapegoating. In his readable book, Bashor shows that the Vienna-born Marie Antoinette, as a foreigner (and, probably, as a woman), became a scapegoat for the mob’s rage and that her trial was a sham. He marshals a wide array of evidence, carefully distinguishing likely and trustworthy accounts from less believable ones and sorting out confusing episodes such as the Carnation Plot. In all this, the author provides novelistic and empathetic attention to detail and personalities, as when he notes that Marie Antoinette recorded the heights of her children on the prison wall or how she kept busy by converting toothpicks into tapestry needles.

Bashor describes the damp, filthy prison’s privations attempts to help or rescue the queen the revolutionary tribunal and the monarch’s trial with its prosecutor, indictment, jury, witnesses, testimony, and sentencing and Marie Antoinette’s final moments. 14, and two days later she was found guilty and sent to the guillotine. 2, 1793, when this book begins, Marie Antoinette was taken to the Conciergerie prison in Paris. The king was executed in January 1793 on Aug.

Bashor ( Marie Antoinette’s Head, 2013, etc.), a professor of global issues at Franklin University, tells the story of Marie Antoinette’s last 10 weeks by drawing on contemporary sources as well as modern scholarship. This scholarly work thoroughly documents Marie Antoinette’s imprisonment, trial, and execution.

Marie Antoinette's Darkest Days by Will Bashor